MINI2

Nic D · Dec 6th, 2003, 11:45 AM

As some know i've been to the Essen motorshow, here's a brief write up i've done for other forums so i've decided to post it here too.

We arrived in Neiderhein Airport around 1 o clock on sunday afternoon and picked up our hire car from Hertz where we were upgraded from a Spam Chariot Ford Fusion to a Renault Megane 1.9dCi (Yes diesels are @#%$). From here we set off without consulting a map with me as a hungover co driver in various directions trying to find an Autobhan - we failed miserably so stopped at a petrol station to buy a map and from here we worked out where we were so used the smaller roads to work our way over to Essen, navigating accross to Essen using the smaller roads was surprisingly good fun and taught us a fair bit about how to get about.

Finally we reached Essen after a couple of hours and a couple of lare bottles of Warsteiner (consumed by me) and we set about finding the hotel, being ignorant british ***** we refused to ask anyone directions and set about racing other cars from traffic lights around the cities ring roads. What followed was a classic back seat driver moment of me shouting "there! there! there!" and pointing at the hotel. Neither of the front two could see what i was pointing at of course...

We were staying at the Holiday Inn and its a perfect choice of hotel due to its cleanliness, location, friendly staff and free porn stations. After checking in and dumping our stuff in the room we had a couple of beers in the hotel bar before the night manager Patrick showed us a map of where to go to eat. The first night we went to an american themed bar where again a lot of people spoke english and the food was very good with proper minced beef beef burgers, not the ***** we get over here.

We walked back to our hotel through the christmas market and its hard not to be impressed by the amount of effort which has gone into it, didnt manage to try some mulled wine though - next time. Essen as a city doesnt seem to be crammed full of bars and nightclubs, mostly having cafe bars which seem much more chilled and relaxed. It's also fantastically clean for what is quite a large city.

Fairly early the next morning we had brekkie and asked directions for the show. To get there was fairly simple from hotel with it being well signposted. Another surprise came from the organisation of carparking with even the police helping by getting the traffic moving as swiftly as possible and stewards in every car park directing people to parking slots as quickly as possible, very unlike the shambles at Birmingham. Parking was very unlike Birmingham too with it being €7 a day for the closest parking and it dropping in price the further away you parked, bus and rail links seemed to be pretty good too.

Considering the number of people trying to get in from our closest entrance we expected to be queing for an hour or so but nope again we were inside withing 15mins. It's so much better organised than the NEC Motorshow. Entry was €16 per day with a cheap happy hour ticket for 6-9 when some stands closed.

In the first day we covered what we thought was a lot of the show. We were wrong, badly wrong! I guess that at most we covered around half of it and only at the very last half hour with my camera batteries dead did we discover the Brabus, Carlsson, Tech Art, ProjectTwo etc stands! We'd also missed out the Ferrari F1 stand and design studio too. You can get an idea of what order we went round by the order of the photographs which i've hosted at http://www.evoposters.net/carsb/album04?page=1.

I'm still currently uploading pictures, i hope to have done them all by tomorrow. Some of the pictures have come out blurry, i'm @#%$ with a camera. Ask away if theres any particular picture you'd like to know about and i'll see if i can remember what it was. I'll let the pictures do the talking.

At about 6 o clock we headed back to our hotel completly knackered due to walking what feels like miles and if you've seen the size of the the show you'd believe it was miles! After a few more beers we decided to head out to find a proper German pub selling local food, not the chained stuff we had last night, Patrick recommend a place called the 'Pfefferkorn' which translates obviously as the Peppercorn. After getting lost for about an hour we parked up only to look up and see it directly infront of us - again another you had to be there it was @#%$ hilarious moment.

The food and beer in this place can only be described as fantastic with a rump steak meal easily being better than most fillets you'll eat over here, the service was great as well and the highlight of the evening was a grouchy old lady asking us for money in German before turning back up later to nick some serviettes and cutlery. Charity obviously started at home for her. The food was a little expensive so it seemed to start with but after eating i had no complaints.

Again it was the same routine for the following day and you can pick up where we started with the photos of the Ferrari Formula 1 cars. The main theme for this years Essen motorshow was 55 years of Ferrari in F1 and they had brought together a collection of just over 20 cars. The most amazing thing was actually being able to get close enough to touch these cars if you wanted too, something i've never experienced at a motorshow in the UK where you either have to que for hours and then get turned away by a monkey in a suit. People were very polite and concienous not to ruin your photographs (i did a good enough job ruining my own!) and the only rules were not to cross the 3ft high barriers seperating you from the cars, its amazing that everyone respects this which in return allows you such close access to some of the most important racing cars in history. I can't really put into words how awe inspiring this was, it was immense. Hopefully from my pictures you can get an idea of how close we were to the cars.

It was the same at every stand, in the classic's hall there was a display of Ferrari's including a new Enzo, F40, 250 GTO etc, again you could touch these cars if you wanted. An amazing site in this hall was a replica of a 250 GTO built to a scale sized with a 4 cyclinder Fiat Engine. This hall had to contain millions of pounds of cars with everything from 1930 Mercedes, 600 pullman, 300SL's, 300SLR's, Cobra's, tuned F40, Dodge Vipers and also a Lamborghini stand which included everything from a Jalpa to a new Gallardo and Murcielago with Diablo's and Countachs thrown in. Again the pictures should be able to show some of what was there.

All the pics arn't up yet but heres a small car list!

Car List

Mercedes Mclaren SLR
Mercedes 4 door coupe vision car
Mercedes CLK DTM cars - loads of them
Audi Le Man's Racer
Audi TT DTM's including one car on hydralics which was linked to a PS2 and moved side to side/backwards/forwards as you played Gran Turismo concept!
Loads of modded MkV Golf's which look so much better in the flesh
Polo 1.4 16V sport with a turbo conversion
Mk4 Golf R32 with supercharger
1.8 8V G60 engine with fully gas flowed head on throttle bodies
2.9 VR6 engined mk2 Golf with an amazing manifold
Brabus Mercedes stand with over half a million pounds worth of mega modded motors - even little c class' were stuffed with 6.1 litre V12's!!
Lorinser stand which was much the same as above but with more extreme body styling
Hamann stand with Gull winged door's on Porsche turbo's and Merc SL's plus other mad stuff!
Gemballa 3.8litre flat six turbo charged Boxster
Boxster styled to look like a 550 Spyder
996 GT3 Cup which was ****ing gorgeous on the Schrick Stand
A few modded Mini's - one wearing 20" inch wheels
Loads of Cayenne's with body styling by i think Tech Art which looked amazing in the flesh
A proper Porsche 996 GT1 (i think-will check later) which had competed in the Nurburgring 24hr with a video showing some hot laps - amazing again.
Honda S2000 in race trim with full livery
Honda NSX in race trim and livery
Toyota MR2 with this funky body work, looks mad.
Toyota F1 Car
Mercedes F1 Car
Renault F1 Car
BMW's F1 Car
Ferrari F1 Car (One of Schmauchers actual cars in which he won this years championship)
Ferrari Enzo
Ferrari F40
Tuned Ferrari F40
Loads of Ferrari F360's including a supercharged one on the Pirelli stand)
Ferrari 250 GTO x 2 including one mad one which was a scale model powered by a fiat engine

In the two full days we were there we missed out a lot of stuff with us only quickly scanning some tuner stands and completly ignoring all the ICE stands, you need a full 3 days to do it all i'd say, maybe more.

I'm not great at writing up reports so i'll stop here but its enough to say i'm definitly going back next year and this time we will be driving over and hopefully spending a couple of days at the Nurburgring as well (it's about 2 hours drive away from Essen).

In brief, if your into cars, you must go to the Essen Motorshow, it's quite simply the BEST motorshow in Europe & i'd never bother to go to the British Motorshow again.

Roll on next year...

Cheers

Nic

Morty · Dec 6th, 2003, 12:01 PM

3 days ?????

Eehm I passed through it all in about eeehm let's say 5 hours ??? LOL

But I must say I went through all the halls rather quickly and stopped only at stands that looked interesting to me

Mostly stands with goodies for MINI or where MINI's were displayed oh and I did stop at all the toy car stands

(found a nice Follow me MINI)

I did stop at Rieger, WS, Hamann, etc etc all the great tuners... but didn't go to stands that all carry the same stuff (taillights, steering wheels etc)

But in the 5 hours I spent there.. I really saw some beautiful cars (Ferrari, Carllson, Brabus, etc etc )
Nice Show !!

Nic D · Dec 6th, 2003, 12:04 PM

5 hours?! I think i spent 2 hours or so at the Ferrari display, then there's the classic's etc...you need at leats 2 days i reckon.

Mini Cruiser · Dec 6th, 2003, 12:05 PM

sounds like you had fun nic

Nic D · Dec 6th, 2003, 12:08 PM

Had a great time thank Clare, like i said can't wait till next year when i take the car to the Ring too

Morty · Dec 6th, 2003, 12:11 PM

I spent most of the time at the Le Mans Audi, at Carllson, Brabus and at the Hamann stand

I just passed alongside Ferrari and checked them out.
But our big boss has had 6 and still owns 3. Latest one he bought is the 356 spider I believe

I had to chance to drive a couple of them, so I guess that's why I didn't spent too much time at ferrari.

Or it could be the fact that the week before I went to Speed and Design in Holland and Ferrari and Lamborghini were there too.

Dec 6th, 2003, 11:45 AM	#1
Nic D MINI2 Master Join Date: Mar 2003 Location: Swansea Local Time: 01:43 AM Posts: 902 Offline	The 2003 Essen Motorshow. As some know i've been to the Essen motorshow, here's a brief write up i've done for other forums so i've decided to post it here too. We arrived in Neiderhein Airport around 1 o clock on sunday afternoon and picked up our hire car from Hertz where we were upgraded from a Spam Chariot Ford Fusion to a Renault Megane 1.9dCi (Yes diesels are @#%$). From here we set off without consulting a map with me as a hungover co driver in various directions trying to find an Autobhan - we failed miserably so stopped at a petrol station to buy a map and from here we worked out where we were so used the smaller roads to work our way over to Essen, navigating accross to Essen using the smaller roads was surprisingly good fun and taught us a fair bit about how to get about. Finally we reached Essen after a couple of hours and a couple of lare bottles of Warsteiner (consumed by me) and we set about finding the hotel, being ignorant british *** we refused to ask anyone directions and set about racing other cars from traffic lights around the cities ring roads. What followed was a classic back seat driver moment of me shouting "there! there! there!" and pointing at the hotel. Neither of the front two could see what i was pointing at of course... We were staying at the Holiday Inn and its a perfect choice of hotel due to its cleanliness, location, friendly staff and free porn stations. After checking in and dumping our stuff in the room we had a couple of beers in the hotel bar before the night manager Patrick showed us a map of where to go to eat. The first night we went to an american themed bar where again a lot of people spoke english and the food was very good with proper minced beef beef burgers, not the * we get over here. We walked back to our hotel through the christmas market and its hard not to be impressed by the amount of effort which has gone into it, didnt manage to try some mulled wine though - next time. Essen as a city doesnt seem to be crammed full of bars and nightclubs, mostly having cafe bars which seem much more chilled and relaxed. It's also fantastically clean for what is quite a large city. Fairly early the next morning we had brekkie and asked directions for the show. To get there was fairly simple from hotel with it being well signposted. Another surprise came from the organisation of carparking with even the police helping by getting the traffic moving as swiftly as possible and stewards in every car park directing people to parking slots as quickly as possible, very unlike the shambles at Birmingham. Parking was very unlike Birmingham too with it being €7 a day for the closest parking and it dropping in price the further away you parked, bus and rail links seemed to be pretty good too. Considering the number of people trying to get in from our closest entrance we expected to be queing for an hour or so but nope again we were inside withing 15mins. It's so much better organised than the NEC Motorshow. Entry was €16 per day with a cheap happy hour ticket for 6-9 when some stands closed. In the first day we covered what we thought was a lot of the show. We were wrong, badly wrong! I guess that at most we covered around half of it and only at the very last half hour with my camera batteries dead did we discover the Brabus, Carlsson, Tech Art, ProjectTwo etc stands! We'd also missed out the Ferrari F1 stand and design studio too. You can get an idea of what order we went round by the order of the photographs which i've hosted at http://www.evoposters.net/carsb/album04?page=1. I'm still currently uploading pictures, i hope to have done them all by tomorrow. Some of the pictures have come out blurry, i'm @#%$ with a camera. Ask away if theres any particular picture you'd like to know about and i'll see if i can remember what it was. I'll let the pictures do the talking. At about 6 o clock we headed back to our hotel completly knackered due to walking what feels like miles and if you've seen the size of the the show you'd believe it was miles! After a few more beers we decided to head out to find a proper German pub selling local food, not the chained stuff we had last night, Patrick recommend a place called the 'Pfefferkorn' which translates obviously as the Peppercorn. After getting lost for about an hour we parked up only to look up and see it directly infront of us - again another you had to be there it was @#%$ hilarious moment. The food and beer in this place can only be described as fantastic with a rump steak meal easily being better than most fillets you'll eat over here, the service was great as well and the highlight of the evening was a grouchy old lady asking us for money in German before turning back up later to nick some serviettes and cutlery. Charity obviously started at home for her. The food was a little expensive so it seemed to start with but after eating i had no complaints. Again it was the same routine for the following day and you can pick up where we started with the photos of the Ferrari Formula 1 cars. The main theme for this years Essen motorshow was 55 years of Ferrari in F1 and they had brought together a collection of just over 20 cars. The most amazing thing was actually being able to get close enough to touch these cars if you wanted too, something i've never experienced at a motorshow in the UK where you either have to que for hours and then get turned away by a monkey in a suit. People were very polite and concienous not to ruin your photographs (i did a good enough job ruining my own!) and the only rules were not to cross the 3ft high barriers seperating you from the cars, its amazing that everyone respects this which in return allows you such close access to some of the most important racing cars in history. I can't really put into words how awe inspiring this was, it was immense. Hopefully from my pictures you can get an idea of how close we were to the cars. It was the same at every stand, in the classic's hall there was a display of Ferrari's including a new Enzo, F40, 250 GTO etc, again you could touch these cars if you wanted. An amazing site in this hall was a replica of a 250 GTO built to a scale sized with a 4 cyclinder Fiat Engine. This hall had to contain millions of pounds of cars with everything from 1930 Mercedes, 600 pullman, 300SL's, 300SLR's, Cobra's, tuned F40, Dodge Vipers and also a Lamborghini stand which included everything from a Jalpa to a new Gallardo and Murcielago with Diablo's and Countachs thrown in. Again the pictures should be able to show some of what was there. All the pics arn't up yet but heres a small car list! Car List Mercedes Mclaren SLR Mercedes 4 door coupe vision car Mercedes CLK DTM cars - loads of them Audi Le Man's Racer Audi TT DTM's including one car on hydralics which was linked to a PS2 and moved side to side/backwards/forwards as you played Gran Turismo concept! Loads of modded MkV Golf's which look so much better in the flesh Polo 1.4 16V sport with a turbo conversion Mk4 Golf R32 with supercharger 1.8 8V G60 engine with fully gas flowed head on throttle bodies 2.9 VR6 engined mk2 Golf with an amazing manifold Brabus Mercedes stand with over half a million pounds worth of mega modded motors - even little c class' were stuffed with 6.1 litre V12's!! Lorinser stand which was much the same as above but with more extreme body styling Hamann stand with Gull winged door's on Porsche turbo's and Merc SL's plus other mad stuff! Gemballa 3.8litre flat six turbo charged Boxster Boxster styled to look like a 550 Spyder 996 GT3 Cup which was **ing gorgeous on the Schrick Stand A few modded Mini's - one wearing 20" inch wheels Loads of Cayenne's with body styling by i think Tech Art which looked amazing in the flesh A proper Porsche 996 GT1 (i think-will check later) which had competed in the Nurburgring 24hr with a video showing some hot laps - amazing again. Honda S2000 in race trim with full livery Honda NSX in race trim and livery Toyota MR2 with this funky body work, looks mad. Toyota F1 Car Mercedes F1 Car Renault F1 Car BMW's F1 Car Ferrari F1 Car (One of Schmauchers actual cars in which he won this years championship) Ferrari Enzo Ferrari F40 Tuned Ferrari F40 Loads of Ferrari F360's including a supercharged one on the Pirelli stand) Ferrari 250 GTO x 2 including one mad one which was a scale model powered by a fiat engine In the two full days we were there we missed out a lot of stuff with us only quickly scanning some tuner stands and completly ignoring all the ICE stands, you need a full 3 days to do it all i'd say, maybe more. I'm not great at writing up reports so i'll stop here but its enough to say i'm definitly going back next year and this time we will be driving over and hopefully spending a couple of days at the Nurburgring as well (it's about 2 hours drive away from Essen). In brief, if your into cars, you must go to the Essen Motorshow, it's quite simply the BEST motorshow in Europe & i'd never bother to go to the British Motorshow again. Roll on next year... Cheers Nic

Dec 6th, 2003, 12:05 PM	#4 (permalink)
Mini Cruiser Pain In The ... Join Date: Jul 2002 Location: Midlands, uk Local Time: 01:43 AM Posts: 2,716 Offline	sounds like you had fun nic www.MINI2mini.org the original and best MINI club in the UK

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Dec 6th, 2003, 12:01 PM	#2 (permalink)
Morty * shooting pictures * Join Date: Apr 2002 Location: Near Antwerp Local Time: 01:43 AM Posts: 3,016 Offline	3 days ????? Eehm I passed through it all in about eeehm let's say 5 hours ??? LOL But I must say I went through all the halls rather quickly and stopped only at stands that looked interesting to me Mostly stands with goodies for MINI or where MINI's were displayed oh and I did stop at all the toy car stands (found a nice Follow me MINI) I did stop at Rieger, WS, Hamann, etc etc all the great tuners... but didn't go to stands that all carry the same stuff (taillights, steering wheels etc) But in the 5 hours I spent there.. I really saw some beautiful cars (Ferrari, Carllson, Brabus, etc etc ) Nice Show !!

Dec 6th, 2003, 12:04 PM	#3 (permalink)
Nic D MINI2 Master Join Date: Mar 2003 Location: Swansea Local Time: 01:43 AM Posts: 902 Offline	5 hours?! I think i spent 2 hours or so at the Ferrari display, then there's the classic's etc...you need at leats 2 days i reckon.

Dec 6th, 2003, 12:08 PM	#5 (permalink)
Nic D MINI2 Master Join Date: Mar 2003 Location: Swansea Local Time: 01:43 AM Posts: 902 Offline	Had a great time thank Clare, like i said can't wait till next year when i take the car to the Ring too

Dec 6th, 2003, 12:11 PM	#6 (permalink)
Morty * shooting pictures * Join Date: Apr 2002 Location: Near Antwerp Local Time: 01:43 AM Posts: 3,016 Offline	I spent most of the time at the Le Mans Audi, at Carllson, Brabus and at the Hamann stand I just passed alongside Ferrari and checked them out. But our big boss has had 6 and still owns 3. Latest one he bought is the 356 spider I believe I had to chance to drive a couple of them, so I guess that's why I didn't spent too much time at ferrari. Or it could be the fact that the week before I went to Speed and Design in Holland and Ferrari and Lamborghini were there too.

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